[anti-abuse-wg] Authorities, or lack thereof

Ronald,

I suspect you won't like my answer, but I think there's also a 
fundamental misunderstanding of the role of Working Groups in the RIPE 
Community at the heart of your question.
Ronald F. Guilmette wrote the following on 19/06/2013 22:47:
> Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What remains is policy proposals that are effective in getting such
>> allocation requests denied and/or revoked.  Which seems to be more of a can
>> of worms here than in any other RIR.
>
> I thank my friend Suresh for bringing to my attention a really more
> important issue, and one that I should have really considered before
> I made any of my recent posts imploring all within the Working Group
> to work on solidifying a firmer and more complete defintion of "abuse".
>
> As the Chair has courteously pointed out to me, the charter of this
> Working Group, such as it is, already is fairly clear that "spam" and
> "spamming" are most definitely issues within the remit of this Working
> Group.  But that begs the larger question:  Assuming for the moment
> that there existed a case in which all or a majority of this Working
> Group were convinced that a given particular allocation of number
> resources was registered for, and was being used exclusively and com-
> pletely for the production and distribution of spam, then at that
> point would either the Working Group, or its Chair, have either the
> authority or the responsibility to (a) direct or (b) request or (c)
> suggest that RIPE NCC withdraw/cancel/retract said allocation?

This WG has no greater authority to direct or request anything from the 
NCC than any other member of the community. The WG is not, explicitly, a 
group within the community that directly deals with abuse. It is a group 
of people who are interested in the subject, who may well work together 
to create policies or documents or form a better understanding of the 
issue, but it is not a created group to deal with abuse.

Now, to go a bit further here. The members of the WG can ask the NCC to 
do a particular thing. Depending on the thing that might be an action 
item that arises out of the mailing list or a meeting (eg Could the NCC 
please clarify under exactly what circumstances an LIR could be closed 
or deregistered). The alternative is a policy (eg Could the NCC please 
implement the abuse-c). The WG cannot say "we do not like this operator, 
please shut them down" in the same way the Routing WG cannot say "we 
require all members of the NCC to abandon BGP". That is not what WGs in 
the RIPE community are for.

The WG can of course make the NCC aware of a bad operator and the WG can 
certainly give advice on how best to bring such issues to the NCC's 
attention (or to the attention of LEAs etc), but neither Tobias nor I 
sit down with the NCC and go through lists of LIRs, pointing out who is 
naughty or nice.

> If neither (a) nor (b) nor even (c) applies, then regardless of the
> formal or working definition of "abuse", it would seem to me... in-
> tending no offense to any person here present... that the Working
> Group could not reasonably be viewed as anything other than a paper
> tiger, utterly devoid of teeth and/or authority, and thus of no
> particular value or use or significance to anyone or any thing...
> but I am more than willing to be convinced otherwise.

First off, no offence is taken. :)

However, I think your comments here stem from a fundamental 
misunderstanding of how the community (of which you are a part, 
regardless of your earlier comments on the list) works. The WG was not 
set up to up to do those things. It has been a handy by-product of 
sharing information and expertise that reports have been passed on to 
the NCC, but it's not why we're here. There are 9000+ members of the 
RIPE NCC and countless others in the community. All of those operators 
will tell you "my network, my rules" albeit they are forced by law or 
contract to take other views into consideration. They are not beholden 
to this or any other WG unless a policy is made or a motion passed by 
the membership.

At no point in the Charter for the AA-WG does it suggest we're here to 
take back resources, so I'm genuinely very interested to know where this 
all came from?

Brian
Co-Chair, AA-WG